Muslim writers in France suffer abuse for challenging extremism

Liberty, equality, fraternity are the founding principles of France, but the secular republic is caught in a war of words between Muslim intellectuals and radical Islam.

Moroccan-born French journalist Zineb El Rhazoui. Vidar Ruud / AFP.

Zineb El Rhazoui is known as the most protected woman in France, under constant police surveillance to keep her from harm.

She is not a double agent, an underworld informer or a whistleblower whose information might bring down a rogue corporation. She is a writer, one of a small number in France of Muslim origin who have suffered abuse and even death threats because of the way they challenge extremism.

El Rhazoui, a Moroccan-born author and columnist for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, refuses to be silenced.

She escaped the January 2015 murders at the magazine’s Paris offices because she was visiting her native Casablanca but is scornful of suggestions she should pipe down, change her identity and make a quiet life elsewhere.

"Defending my freedom and that of others is primarily a question of dignity," El Rhazoui, 34, the mother of a newborn baby, tells The National. "When we accept the loss of a little freedom for a little security, we end up losing both.

“Am I really more endangered than anyone else? All victims of terrorism, whether in France, Syria or Nigeria, are innocent – their only crime being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

When terrorists purporting to act in Islam’s name strike in the West and ordinary people are targeted, ordinary Muslims are also among the early victims.

But as community leaders and anti-racism activists confront the stereotypes created or reinforced by such attacks, some contentious writers attract not only menace from shadowy extremists but criticism from an intellectual left that equates critical scrutiny with racism.

The conservative French newspaper Le Figaro identified several it described as under threat because of what they have said or written. While there are obvious differences between threats and mere criticism, some on the political left or active in fighting racism and discrimination have not held back. For Le Figaro, the writers become victims of "double jeopardy", penalised by both the risk of violence and hostile commentary.

But if the phenomenon has broadened, it is not new.

Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses offended many Muslims when published in 1988, cannot completely relax 28 years later. The fatwa issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, has never been lifted and there is a large bounty, amounting to US$4 million (Dh14.69m), on his head. Iran's only concession has been to declare that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie".

And amid continuing Israel-Palestinian conflict and turmoil in parts of the Middle East and Maghreb, academics and commentators still argue about what can and cannot be published without causing unacceptable offence.

In the often gruelling battle against Islamophobia in western society, there has been talk in France of "Islamo-gauchisme", a tendency described by France's left-wing Liberation newspaper as a strange alliance between factions of the left and reactionary Islamism. Le Figaro suggested that the support Rushdie initially won from the cultural and intellectual circles "would probably be less evident today".

With its historic attachment to freedom of expression as a fundamental human right, France is accustomed to robust debate. But concern has been expressed about escalating rhetoric.

El Rhazoui, for example, has suffered what Le Figaro calls a "massive campaign of intimidation", extending at its most extreme to social media messages, shared thousands of times, with the hashtag "Kill Zineb to avenge the Prophet".

El Rhazoui, the author of 13, a new book on ISIL's slaughter of 130 people in Paris on November 13, is unapologetic. Having been born in Casablanca, taught Arabic in Cairo and joined Arab Spring protests in Morocco, she feels "no identity problem" of the kind experienced by many born in the West of Arab descent.

El Rhazoui says seeing racism and Islamophobia in anyone who criticises aspects of Islam is to confuse ideas and people. “The denial of rights to Muslims, to consider them second-class citizens and exclude them from society, that’s racism,” she says, not the differences Islamic scholars had expressed throughout history.

Yet she respects conservative Muslims who oppose her: “Nothing is more civilised or noble in humans than to debate ideas. The day we succeed in Muslim societies in having a calm ideological confrontation between conservatives and progressives, we will have come a long way.”

The French-Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui, blames hostility towards him on resentment of his investigations of radicalisation, including a book written with a brother of Mohammed Merah, the criminal-turned-Al Qaeda sympathiser who murdered seven people, including three Jewish children, in southwestern France in 2012.

Not everyone considers Sifaoui a fair-minded chronicler, however. He has been branded a "Zionist agent" by both far-left and far-right websites, a racist by the pro-Communist newspaper L'Humanité and an opportunist who compounds allegiance to Israel by presenting Islam as a "terrifying threat", by the French geopolitical analyst Pascal Boniface. He rejects the labels but claims they serve to "prepare the ground for my actual liquidation".

Nadia Remadna, a French-Algerian mother of two who created the Brigade of Mothers to combat extremist influence on young Maghrébins in poor French suburbs, came under fire after publishing a book sub-titled Once we feared our children falling into delinquency; now we're afraid they'll become terrorists.

As her media profile grew, she started to receive threats. One anonymous caller said: “You’re helping unbelievers. We know where your children go to school.”

The French media has highlighted the cases of other writers, from Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds, accused of fuelling Islamophobia.

Fifteen academics co-signed a withering condemnation of Kamel Daoud, an Algerian novelist, in Le Monde, the same left-of-centre newspaper where he had written about the events of New Year's Eve in the German city of Cologne after hundreds of women reported being sexually harassed or molested by migrants.

Daoud deplored far-right attempts to depict all immigrants as potential rapists. But he reserved sharper words for the “naïve” political left, which he accused, in terms deeply insulting to Muslims, of deliberately ignoring a cultural gulf separating the Arab-Muslim world from Europe.

In their riposte, the academics claimed he was “feeding the Islamophobic fantasies of a growing part of the European population”. Previously the subject of a fatwa issued by an Algerian cleric amid another controversy in 2014, Daoud suspended journalistic work in favour of fiction.

Yasser Louati, head of international relations for the French Collective Against Islamophobia (CCIF), says such writers are not martyrs to free speech since they have ample access to public platforms.

Louati, who lived in Abu Dhabi during an earlier career as an airline pilot, opposes “crossing the line between the right to criticise a religion and attacking people’s dignity and equality”.

He argues that ruling elites in the West fail to accept Muslim citizens as fellow countrymen instead of “a suspicious group which – at best – should be kept at bay and at worst treated like an enemy”. And the demonisation of Muslims, and confusing conservative Islam with extremism, he says, plays directly into the hands of ISIL.

El Rhazoui counters that the only limits to free expression should be those imposed by laws forbidding racism, hatred and incitement.

Yet she does feels "irrational" guilt at having lived while others at Charlie Hebdo died.

“For months, I was haunted by the memory of some former colleagues who were killed while they had never drawn anyone nor written a word about Islam,” she says.

Gradually, she concluded the only culprits were the murderers themselves.

“I do not want to sound mystical,” she says, “but now I better realise the value of life. It tells me that we all have a mission to accomplish before dying.”

Colin Randall is a freelance journalist based in France and former executive editor of The National.